High-Performance Visualization

High-performance visualization capabilities are available on ARC’s GPU-enabled clusters: Hokiespeed and Blueridge.

The GPUs in these clusters are primarily to accelerate rendering tasks (drawing high- resolution plots, animations, 3D and video), enabling cluster visualization via offline batch usage or real-time remote visualization to thin clients. Both of these visualization models are proven and heavily-used resources in the national labs and Teragrid/XSEDE.

For example, Hokiespeed and Blueridge include ParaView, an open source application that allow data, computational, and graphic processing to be performed on the cluster. This can be done in two ways:

Via offscreen batch scripting (e.g. using Python), where the results of the visualization are saved to image or video files.

During an interactive session, where visualization is viewed and manipulated on the client machine in real-time.

Doing the processing where the data is housed substantially accelerates the speed with which complex rendering can occur. Download detailed documentation on ARC usage of these software packages at the links below: